A bad call you can't blame on the referees may bring replay to soccer

AP PhotosThis Sunday, June 27, 2010 file combination of six photos shows Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer looking at the ball that hit the bar, bounce over the line during the World Cup round of 16 soccer match between Germany and England at Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The goal was disallowed by the game's referee. After blown calls at vital moments of vital games, before a worldwide audience at the World Cup, the guardians of international soccer are being pressed harder than ever to explain resistance to video replay and their embrace of human error.

As easy as it is to lump the unfortunate England no-goal in with the rest of the many refereeing blunders for which the 2010 World Cup will unfortunately be remembered, it could very well be the one incident that causes FIFA to change its stubborn stance on goal-line technology.

Unlike the other infamous incidents, however, on the non-goal by Frank Lampard, neither the referee nor the assistant can be blamed for the mistake; they did everything right, and the mistake was completely beyond their control. The referee was in the correct position to make any other call, in the middle of the field outside the penalty area. The assistant referee, who is officially counted on to be in a better position to see the goal line, was in his correct position, even with the second-to-last German defender to be able to correctly judge offside, which is his top priority (and which was another bone of contention in this tournament, as Clint Dempsey or Carlos Tevez could tell you). In this case, he was about 20 yards from the goal line.

With both officials in the correct spot, it was virtually impossible for either one to see definitively that the entire ball had crossed the entire goal line, and so they could not call it a goal, period. In real time, on live TV from a better angle, I first thought that the ball had not crossed the line.

There was, however, a television camera in the perfect spot, as we all know from the replays, and presumably one in the corresponding place at the other end of the field. All it would take is to have one more official, in the press box, watching a monitor, to get the call right. This fifth official, whose only job would be to make sure that a goal is a goal, could have seen almost instantly that the ball landed well over the line, alerted the referee by pager or even by the voice intercom system already in place between referees and their assistants, and the referee would have ruled that the goal had been scored, possibly before it left the German keeper’s hands.

Any game-delaying dispute would be useless, since players and coaches A) would know that video was used, so the call was almost certainly correct, and B) can’t argue with the referee, since he didn’t make the call. The game would not be delayed, the referee’s authority would be neither questioned nor diminished in any way, and so FIFA does not need to fear the appearance of criticizing the officials.

FIFA has to back up its referees, bad call or good, no matter what. There will always be calls that players or coaches disagree with in virtually every game ever played, and FIFA simply can’t have their national associations swamped with appeals every weekend, or have the referee stop the game to indulge the players’ appeals to look at the stadium video screens.

In that regard, FIFA is absolutely right, the human element (i.e., the acceptance of mistakes) must remain a part of the game. The powers that be just cannot be seen to second-guess most refereeing decisions made in the heat of the moment, the vast majority of which, it must be said, are correct.

There would be no less of a human element here. Forget the calls for a computer chip embedded in the ball, or using the cameras in the nets with beepers or any other more fanciful technologies, just use one more human set of eyes, in one circumstance only (no video ref for offside or handball or fouls in the box or anything else) so that justice can be done.

Even from FIFA’s often unfathomable perspective, there is no downside.